Persistent shell settings; users/groups; permissions CSE 391 Lecture 4 Persistent shell settings; users/groups; permissions slides created by Marty Stepp, modified by Jessica Miller and Ruth Anderson http://www.cs.washington.edu/391/

Lecture summary Persistent settings for your bash shell User accounts and groups File permissions The Super User Useful Tidbit: tar files

.bash_profile and .bashrc Every time you log in to bash (e.g. ssh attu), the commands in ~/.bash_profile are run you can put any common startup commands you want into this file useful for setting up aliases and other settings for remote login Every time you launch a non-login bash terminal (e.g. bash), the commands in ~/.bashrc are run useful for setting up persistent commands for local shell usage, or when launching multiple shells Do not put things that would produce output in .bashrc (e.g. echo) often, .bash_profile is configured to also run .bashrc, but not always Note: a dot (.) in front of a filename indicates a normally hidden file, use ls –a to see

Exercise:Edit your .bashrc Exercise : Make it so that our attu alias from earlier becomes persistent, so that it will work every time we run a shell. Exercise : Make it so that whenever you try to delete or overwrite a file during a move/copy, you will be prompted for confirmation first.

Making Changes Visible After editing your .bashrc or .bash_profile, how do you make the aliases etc. in the file take effect? .bash_profile log on again (e.g ssh attu), or bash -l (el not one) will start a login shell, or source .bash_profile .bashrc start another bash shell (type: bash), or source .bashrc

.plan Another fun settings file Stored in your home directory Contains information you’d like others to be able to see is displayed when the finger protocol is run Exercise: create a quick .plan file, and make sure it works with finger Note: Currently attu is configured so .plan files are not visible. Finger is not installed on the CSE VM.

Unix/Linux is a multi-user operating system. Users Unix/Linux is a multi-user operating system. Every program/process is run by a user. Every file is owned by a user. Every user has a unique integer ID number (UID). Different users have different access permissions, allowing user to: read or write a given file browse the contents of a directory execute a particular program install new software on the system change global system settings ...

Groups group: A collection of users, used as a target of permissions. a group can be given access to a file or resource a user can belong to many groups see who’s in a group using grep <groupname> /etc/group Every file has an associated group. the owner of a file can grant permissions to the group Every group has a unique integer ID number (GID). Exercise: create a file, see its default group, and change it command description groups list the groups to which a user belongs chgrp change the group associated with a file

File permissions types : read (r), write (w), execute (x) people : owner (u), group (g), others (o) on Windows, .exe files are executable programs; on Linux, any file with x permission can be executed permissions are shown when you type ls -l is it a directory? owner (u) group (g) others (o) drwxrwxrwx command description chmod change permissions for a file umask set default permissions for new files

People & Permissions People: each user fits into only one of three permission sets: owner (u) – if you create the file you are the owner, the owner can also be changed (using chown) group (g) – by default a group (e.g. ugrad_cs, fac_cs) is associated with each file others (o) – everyone other than the owner and people who are in the particular group associated with the file You are in the most restrictive set that applies to you – e.g. if you are the owner, those permissions apply to you. Permissions: For regular files, permissions work as follows: read (r) – allows file to be open and read write (w) – allows contents of file to be modified or truncated execute (x) – allows the file to be executed (use for executables or scripts) * Directories also have permissions (covered later). Permission to delete or rename a file is controlled by the permission of its parent directory. The permissions used are classwise most restrictive. Permissions of the owner are always determined by the owner bits, and never by the group or other bits. It is possible for the other and groups to have more permissions than the owner (but this is rarely used).

File permissions Examples Permissions are shown when you type ls –l: -rw-r--r-- 1 rea fac_cs 55 Oct 25 12:02 temp1.txt -rw--w---- 1 rea orca 235 Oct 25 11:06 temp2.txt temp1.txt: owner of the file (rea) has read & write permission group (fac_cs) members have read permission others have read permission temp2.txt: group (orca) members have write permission (but no read permission – can add things to the file but cannot cat it) others have no permissions (cannot read or write)

Changing permissions letter codes: chmod who(+-)what filename chmod u+rw myfile.txt (allow owner to read/write) chmod +x banner (allow everyone to execute) chmod ug+rw,o-rwx grades.xls (owner/group can read and note: -R for recursive write; others nothing) octal (base-8) codes: chmod NNN filename three numbers between 0-7, for owner (u), group (g), and others (o) each gets +4 to allow read, +2 for write, and +1 for execute chmod 600 myfile.txt (owner can read/write (rw)) chmod 664 grades.dat (owner rw; group rw; other r) chmod 751 banner (owner rwx; group rx; other x) Note, no space after the comma!

chmod and umask chmod u+rw myfile.txt (allow owner to read/write) Note: leaves “group” and “other” permissions as they were. chmod 664 grades.dat (owner rw; group rw; other r) Note: sets permissions for “owner”, “group” and “other” all at once. umask – returns the “mask” in use, determines the default permissions set on files and directories I create. Can also be used to set that mask. % umask 0022 % touch silly.txt % ls –l silly.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 rea fac_cs 0 Oct 25 12:04 silly.txt 0022 means that files I create will have group and other “write bits” turned off: 1) Take the bitwise complement of 0228 -> 7558 2) AND with 6668 for files (7778 for directories) : 7558 = 111 101 101 6668 = 110 110 110 110 100 100 = 6448 (owner rw, group r, other r)

Exercises Change the permissions on myfile.txt so that: Now try this: Others cannot read it. Group members can execute it. Others cannot read or write it. Group members & Others can read and write it. Everyone has full access. Now try this: Deny all access from everyone. !!! is it dead?

Exercises (Solutions) Change the permissions on myfile.txt so that: Others cannot read it. chmod o-r myfile.txt Group members can execute it. chmod g+x myfile.txt Others cannot read or write it. chmod o-rw myfile.txt Group members & Others can read and write it. chmod go+rw myfile.txt Everyone has full access. chmod ugo+rwx myfile.txt Now try this: Deny all access from everyone. chmod ugo-rwx myfile.txt !!! is it dead? I own this file. Can I change the Owner’s (u) permissions?

Directory Permissions Read, write, execute a directory? Read - permitted to read the contents of directory (view files and sub-directories in that directory, run ls on the directory) Write - permitted to write in to the directory (add, delete, or rename & create files and sub-directories in that directory) Execute - permitted to enter into that directory (cd into that directory) It is possible to have any combination of these permissions: Try these: Have read permission for a directory, but NOT execute permission ???? Have execute permission for a directory, but NOT read permission ??? *Note: permissions assigned to a directory are not inherited by the files within that directory

Directory Permissions Read, write, execute a directory? Read - permitted to read the contents of directory (view files and sub-directories in that directory, run ls on the directory) Write - permitted to write in to the directory (add, delete, or rename & create files and sub-directories in that directory) Execute - permitted to enter into that directory (cd into that directory) It is possible to have any combination of these permissions: Have read permission for a directory, but NOT execute permission Can do an ls from outside of the directory but cannot cd into it, cannot access files in the directory Have execute permission for a directory, but NOT read permission Can cd into the directory, can access files in that directory if you already know their name, but cannot do an ls of the directory *Note: permissions assigned to a directory are not inherited by the files within that directory

Permissions don’t travel Note in the previous examples that permissions are separate from the file If I disable read access to a file, I can still look at its permissions If I upload a file to a directory, its permissions will be the same as if I created a new file locally Takeaway: permissions, users, and groups reside on the particular machine you’re working on. If you email a file or throw it on a thumbdrive, no permissions information is attached. Why? Is this a gaping security hole?

Careful with -R Say I have a directory structure, with lots of .txt files scattered I want to remove all permissions for Others on all of the text files First attempt: chmod –R o-rwx *.txt What happened? This command will: change permissions on all the files that end with .txt in the current directory, AND it will recursively change the permissions on any files that end with .txt in directories whose name end in .txt (you probably do not have any directories whose names end that way!) This is not really recursive in the way you meant it to be! (see next slide…)

Careful with –R (fix) Say I have a directory structure, with lots of .txt files scattered I want to remove all permissions for Others on all of the text files First attempt: chmod –R o-rwx *.txt What happened? Try and fix this using find and xargs! find –name "*.txt" find –name "*.txt" | xargs chmod o-rwx

Super-user (root) super-user: An account used for system administration. has full privileges on the system usually represented as a user named root Most users have more limited permissions than root protects system from viruses, rogue users, etc. if on your own box, why ever run as a non-root user? Example: Install the valgrind tool on the CSE VM. sudo yum install valgrind command description sudo run a single command with root privileges (prompts for password) su start a shell with root privileges (so multiple commands can be run)

Playing around with power… Courtesy XKCD.com

Playing around with power… Create a file, remove all permissions Now, login as root and change the owner and group to root Bwahaha, is it a brick in a user’s directory? Different distributions have different approaches Compare Fedora to Ubuntu in regards to sudo and su… Power can have dangerous consequences rm * might be just what you want to get rid of everything in a local directory but what if you happened to be in /bin… and you were running as root…

tar files To create a single file from multiple files: description tar create or extract .tar archives (combines multiple files into one .tar file) Originally used to create “tape archive” files Combines multiple files into a single .tar file You probably always want to use –f option and IT SHOULD COME LAST To create a single file from multiple files: $ tar -cf filename.tar stuff_to_archive -c creates an archive -f read to/from a file stuff_to_archive - can be a list of filenames or a directory To extract files from an archive: $ tar -xf filename.tar -x extracts files from an archive

Compressed files To compress a file: $ gzip filename produces: filename.gz To uncompress a file: $ gunzip filename.gz produces: filename Similar for zip, bzip2. See man pages for more details. command description zip, unzip create or extract .zip compressed archives gzip, gunzip GNU free compression programs (single-file) bzip2, bunzip2 slower, optimized compression program (single-file)

.tar.gz archives Many Linux programs are distributed as .tar.gz archives (sometimes called .tgz) You could unpack this in two steps: gzip foo.tar.gz produces: foo.tar tar –xf foo.tar extracts individual files You can also use the tar command to create/extract compressed archive files all in one step: $ tar -xzf filename.tar.gz -x extracts files from an archive -z filter the archive through gzip (compress/uncompress it) -f read to/from a file Handy tip: You can use the “file” command to see what type a file is, just changing the file extension on a file does not change its type.

tar examples You can combine options (-v, -z, etc.) various ways: Create a single .tar archive file from multiple files (without compression): $ tar -cvf filename.tar stuff_to_archive -c creates an archive file called filename.tar -v verbosely list the files processed -f read to/from a file (as opposed to a tape archive) stuff_to_archive - can be filenames or a directory Add –z option and use filename.tar.gz to use compression: $ tar -cvzf filename.tar.gz stuff_to_archive

tar https://xkcd.com/1168/